OPINION
Premium

Rachel Maddow Returns Back to Faking News Stories, and There Is a Crisis of Using 'Constitutional Crisis'

Brad Slager
Brad Slager  |  Feb 14, 2025
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Get access to Brad Slager's "Riffed From the Headlines," a daily VIP feature where he looks to bring accountability to the mainstream media. Use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership!

Low-Octane Gaslighting – MSNBC

  • Just take her at her word, no need to check the details.

Well, Rachel Maddow is back on the full week schedule, and she is back at it again. “It” being her brand of fabricated reporting. Maddow had a breaking exposé where she declared that Elon Musk was effectively being paid off by Donald Trump with an order of a fleet of armored Tesla vehicles, to the tune of $400 million.

Rachel here gets unraveled by the small matter of timing. What she was counting on was nobody looking into the order and discovering that vehicle order had inconveniently been placed prior to Trump taking office.

Gilded Reframe – CBS NEWS

Recommended

What This Swing State Focus Group Said About Trump, Elon, and DOGE Is a Gut Punch for Dems Matt Vespa
Here Are the Top DOGE Takedowns So Far Madeline Leesman

  • So that result they lobbied for the past few years is now unacceptably hateful.

Norah O’Donnell has departed, but the quality of the nightly newscast has not improved. New co-host John Dickerson reported on Donald Trump meeting with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy to start the talks to wrap up the useless Russia-Ukraine War, but had to turn Godwin in his detailing of the talks.

Bear in mind, there has been an insistence on the press for years to end this conflict, but now that Trump is apparently getting close to a resolution, it must be a bad thing. He had to note the location was the same as an infamous accord benefitting Hitler, so that compaarison had to be dropped:

The Ukraine war will be the main topic at the opening of the 61st Munich Security Conference held in a city synonymous with Europe's appeasement of Hitler at a conference in 1938 in the run-up to World War II. History some critics are raising to describe President Trump's dealings with Russian President Putin over Ukraine.

Presentation Paradox – AXIOS

  • Psssh, statistics…

Axios’ race and justice correspondent, Russ Contreras, made a curious declaration – in November, Joe Biden’s border agents apprehended far more illegal immigrants than Trump has under his restrictive new policies. This is presented as a major failure of Trump’s plan, but as Bill Melugin of Fox News corrected, this disparity is due to the fact that Trump’s enforcement has led to illegal crossings slowing to a trickle, leading to the need to make far fewer apprehensions. While Biden’s figure was in the tens of thousands, today barely a few hundred people are even attempting to cross the border daily.

After being called out over this slanted approach, one communications officer from the outlet states the change in arrivals was noted in the piece, but the headline and framing was still making it appear Trump was not achieving what Biden had been doing.

DNC PR Firm – CNN / MSNBC

  • The real crisis is seen in the ratings.

While it has been noted how the newest narrative of the week has been to describe what Trump policies are doing is a “constitutional crisis,” seeing it measured is actually amusing. In just over a two day period, the two networks dropped that phrase 125 times.